Yes Please: Ten Broeck Cottage

How gorgeous is this house?  We’ve been having a bit of a heatwave here in NYC that has left me dreaming about heading upstate to jump in cool crisp lakes, eat homemade blueberry pies and catch up on the stack of magazines that is continuing to grow on my coffee table.

The Ten Broeck Cottage by Messana O’Rorke Architects located in Hudson, New York, is the perfect juxtaposition of old and new; I love the reclaimed pine floor boards and richly oiled wood against the stainless steel and slate.  The farmhouse sits on eight acres, four of which are filled with Rome apple trees and the Taghkanic Creek runs alongside the property with “plunge spots.”  It’s pretty clear that this three bedroom house would be the perfect getaway with some of our dearest friends.  Lucky for us, you can rent the house here.

Yes Please: Dunton Hot Springs

May and June are extra busy months for us.  To keep us going, we’re dreaming of quiet mornings with a ceramic coffee mug in hand, afternoons with nothing more than a book and each other and evenings spent outside enjoying clear skies, bright stars and a good glass of wine.  After spending weeks scouring which beach I wanted to spend my mornings on, I came across the amazingness that is Dunton Hot Springs, which quickly shifted my mind from ocean to hot springs and which just happens to be on sale this very minute on Jetsetter.

Described as a meticulously restored 19th-century ghost town whose tin-roofed, hand-hewn log cabins are fitted with heated slate floors, cozy furnishings and wood burning fireplaces.  Some of them even have their own private hot springs.  The rate includes all meals, which focus on locally sourced organic ingredients served at a communal fireside table or in the open kitchen where guests can watch the chef prepare the day’s meal and even lend a hand.

Sounds like we may be heading to to the Colorado Rockies in June…

An Interview: Alex Calderwood

PSFK recently sat down with Alex Calderwood, founder of the Ace Hotel chain to talk about collaboration, inspiration and intuition.

Piers Fawkes: Alex, I wonder if you can talk to about the collaborations you do. It seems like there’s a kind of fantastic leverage which seems to be very on the pulse of what’s going on in terms of the culture and everything else. Why do you do these collaborations? What’s in it for you?

Alex: It’s a good question. I think in general that the company’s very much rooted in a very collaborative spirit in just the way we work. So in terms of how we create the properties, we try to involve amazing artisans or craftsman or design professionals as much as possible in their respective sort of expertise or art. And so it’s kind of in the DNA at the plan in a sense.

Piers: Why is that?

Alex: I think I’ve always been drawn to the sense of community that develops around the project. So, for example, if you come to a new city. We started in Seattle and then we went to Portland and a couple of other cities, New York and Palm Springs.

But you’re coming to a new city and so you want to create a sense of kind of emotional involvement and creative involvement from different people who are in the community. For example, like we went to New York, we felt it was very important for us to collaborate with a New York firm or New York entity that would help us develop the hotel or design the hotel for a couple of different reasons.

One, that the scale of it, it was a large scale. We just needed to have that, without us having to recreate a whole staff in New York and create a whole design office here. We felt it was more beneficial to collaborate with a firm here as well as just from a timing and logistic standpoint it made more sense just to not recreate the wheel ourselves.

And so we teamed up with this firm, Roman and Williams, and it was a very, very synergistic and very satisfying working relationship with those guys. And we felt like they really were rooted in New York and really represented what our take would be on this particular building we were working with and in this particular context.

And in the same way, when we went out to California, we chose some friends of ours and some people in Los Angeles who we felt really represented that sort of California experience.

And so anyway, to get back to your original question, for me I think that it really engenders this sense of community and kind of, again, emotional investment or emotional involvement in the project. I think that’s kind of where it starts.

And then I think that also a lot of good ideas come from various places. We’re very much a company based on the value that good ideas can come from really anybody.

Piers: Could you tell me a little more about the generation of good ideas in your company? How do you know that the relationship with Stumptown or Opening Ceremony or an artist is a good idea? What gives you that sort of sense?

Alex: Oh, sure. That. Well I think two things. For us, A) it comes down to a little bit of instinct. We’re big believers if something feels right, you at least pursue the conversation and see if it fits. And a lot of times in these things when something feels right the kind of pieces to the puzzle will start to fall into place.

Like for example, Opening Ceremony or Project No. eight or Stumptown. First of all we have a space. We reach out to them. They know what we’re doing. We know what they’re doing. You can start a dialogue. You can kind of get a sense in the beginning of the dialogue if a lot of the positive buttons are starting to kind of be pushed or starting to respond.

So part of it is interesting. But I think the more important part of it is it really comes down to people. So, really getting a sense of all of those examples, as I just mentioned, it really was the kind of direct action between our crew and them and getting the sense that the people felt right. You get a sense of where someone’s intention is coming from.

For us, if it feels like there’s a very genuine intention behind what they’re doing, and a genuine intention for us to work together, then usually kind of all the right answers will show up to have a sense, does the puzzle fall into place.

Piers: I do want to get a sense of where did you focus before that conversation happens? How do you even get the sense of who the right people are to talk to?

Alex: Right. That actually comes through a variety of different channels. Sometimes people reach out to us, and they’ll just say like, “Hey, we heard you’re doing a project, and we’re interested to be involved.”

I think, for example, with Stumptown, when we started the hotel project in Portland, kind of word got out on the street. And I can’t remember if Duane called us first — Duane’s the owner of Stumptown — or whether we called him. But basically, Stumptown is very much kind of hometown favorite in Portland, and we knew we had space, and we liked the idea of a coffee shop. So I believe in that particular instance, he had kind of contacted us first.

Sometimes it comes through other channels. For example, with Project No. eight and Opening Ceremony, there is a gentleman who’s involved in our company, named Michael Bisordi, and he also happens to own a retail brokerage firm.

So he and his staff did a really, really good job of kind of scouring through a lot of different possibilities in Manhattan that could be candidates for the various retail spaces that we had, and distilled it down to kind of like the ones that we thought were the most aligned and sort of the best fit, and really shepherded those conversations through to open up a dialog. So I, in those particular two cases, have to really try to even do a great, great job.

It’s not an easy challenge. So he and his staff did a great job of kind of going through and just really sort of handpicking various different candidates that would be good possibilities.

Piers: I imagine, you don’t suddenly then go into a round of market research to make sure it’s the right sort of company. You use some of that intuition…

Alex: Yeah, for us… I mean, let’s see here. I don’t know if we do, necessarily, a lot of deep analysis or market research, per se. We certainly do a certain level of research. But again, it is so nuanced and comes back to having your ear to the ground, and having a sense of kind of the ebb and flow of what’s going on out there, at least in terms of retail or restaurants or coffee, or whatever the particular area is. So it’s kind of a combination of, like I said, having your ear to the ground, instinct, and a certain level of research.

So it’s not like we went to a traditional retail-marketing firm and said like, “This is our demographic, and please come up with a list of [laughs] candidates that fit that.” It’s really so much more of a psychographic. It’s more nuanced than that.

The Boarding Pass, Reconsidered.

On a recent flight From Seattle to NYC, Tyler Thompson, the creative director at Squarespace, decided to tackle the boarding pass — an object used by many, yet often overlooked and rarely reconsidered.

After some sketches in his Moleskine, Tyler came up with these:

Tyler’s efforts sparked a conversation and others jumped into the ring.  What is important about the designs that follow is that they take into account design limitations, such as the fact that boarding passes are printed with thermal printers and international flights require longer bar codes.  I think too often people redesign products that end up being sexier but don’t really consider the critical elements or the importance of function and usability.  I like that the design community brought these facts to Tyler’s attention and more importantly, I applaud Tyler for opening it up for discussion.  It’s these sorts of conversations that make life interesting.

This is JJ at Graphicology take:

And Timoni Grone‘s version:

And one of my personal favorites from Yoni De Beule:

See more designs and read more of the discussion here

Italia-Part II

A few photos from our most recent trip to Italy taken with my iPhone and spiced up with one of my favorite apps, ShakeItPhoto

An affair with Italy.

We just got back from a much needed, much appreciated and what I’m now deeming the *perfect* trip to Italy.  From the history we encountered in Rome to the olive groves of Umbria to the grittiness in Naples to the charm in Positano, we covered our basis and had an amazing time.  Lots of posts to follow but in the mean time, I want to thank Angela Liguori and her 100% fantastic Rome design guide on Design*Sponge as well as Heidi Swanson for her 20 Things I Encountered in Rome, which led us to amazing cappuccinos and life changing biscotti that was so good we brought some home with us.

moment: Ace Hotel PDX

On a recent trip to Portland, we made an evening out of a delicious dinner at Clyde Common and a late night photobooth session next door at The Ace Hotel.

Dinner:
-pork belly served on top of a fried green tomato, pocha beans and piccalilli
-roasted beets with potatoes, boiled eggs, pickled carrots and touch of fennel
-grilled flatiron steak accompanied by a smoked tomato relish
-roasted peach shortcake with a maple-bourbon ice cream and a dollop praline cream

Cocktail of choice:
East of Eden: Bombay Dry, lemon, elderflower liqueur, Gewurtzraminer reduction and an egg white served up

Summer perfection.

Quotable: A Moveable Feast

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty  feeling and began to be happy, and to make plans.” -Ernest Hemingway

Next weekend I will be on the South Shore of Massachusetts enjoying some of these beauties myself.